The Messolonghi Byron Research Center solicits 20-minute papers for its fourth international student Byron conference to be held May 17-25, 2005. The conference theme will be "Byron the Homeric Traveller." This broad topic may be construed in a variety of ways to focus on biography, history, mythology, or literature. Papers may consider Byron, Homer, the classical, Romantic, or contemporary idea of travel, or other subjects. Please e-mail one-paragraph (approximately 300 words) abstracts to Professor Peter Graham (pegraham@vt.edu) and to Professor Malcolm Kelsall (kelsall@cardiff.ac.uk ) by February 15, 2005. Tentative acceptances will be sent to presenters by March 1. The chosen student presenters should then send completed drafts of their papers by May 1. The student papers will be supplemented by lectures by Greek and English professors and scholars. This year's keynote address will be delivered by Professor Malcolm Kelsall of the University of Wales, Cardiff.

If enrollment requests permit, a limited number of student participants who do not wish to present papers will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

On one day of the conference, graduate and undergraduate English majors from Athens University and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki will come down with their professors to join the group. Then and other times, there will be abundant opportunities to learn about Greek life through first-hand experience. There will be welcoming ceremonies and receptions with meals, singing, and dancing hosted by the Mayor of Messolonghi, the Regional Governor, and mayors of neighboring towns, along with visits to historic and archaeological sites and museums associated with Byron and with Homer. In keeping with the conference's theme, a two-day excursion to the island of Ithaca, with visits to excavations of Odysseos' palace and other archaeological sites, will follow the academic sessions. Conference-goers will have the options of returning by ferry and coach to Messolonghi and from there to Athens or some other destination or staying on for further exploration of Ithaca or other Ionian islands.

A 650-euro conference fee will provide six nights of lodging in double rooms with breakfast at the Theoxenia Hotel by the Messolonghi lagoonside, two nights with breakfast at a hotel on Ithaca, transportation to and from the island, most lunches and dinners, and all social events and excursions. There will be a 100-euro surcharge for single accommodations. The actual cost of the conference is 800 euros, but due to generous sponsorships the Messolonghi Byron Society will be able to reduce the conference fee by 150 euros per person.

Airfare to Greece and transportation to Messolonghi are additional and should be arranged individually.

Again, the deadline for registration and abstracts: February 15, 2005.

Full descriptions of the three previous international student conferences can be found on the Messolonghi Byron Society's web page:

It’s 1355, and the Venetian Senate has just refused to punish with the death penalty a graffiti artist who has insulted the honour of Doge Marino Faliero, the recently elected leader of the Republic. The Doge decides to ‘get justice’—by assassinating the Senators and establishing a dictatorship, with himself as Prince. All the Doge needs to accomplish “leader stabilization, regime change” is “backup,” but the only backup available is “the Conspiracy,” whose objective is to depose HIM. Can the Doge turn this terrorist cell into respectable “Patriots” overnight, without setting off the jewel of the Republic’s defence system -- the mysterious Ratapult?

I invite applications for colleagues in English studies (especially later 18th and early19th century British literature and culture) for a six-week interdisciplinary NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers here at the University of Nebraska in summer 2005. We will work together to gain a fuller appreciation of the broad variety of British Romantic literary culture by examining the interrelations that often go unexplored in traditional scholarship between works executed in a particular genre (poetry, prose fiction, drama, etc.) and the contemporaneous production in the other literary genres as well as in extra-literary areas like the visual arts, music, economics, science, print journalism, and history and historiography.

My goal is to bring together colleagues from all professional ranks and at all stages of their professional careers in order to provide an interactive forum for us to explore the impact for our research and for our teaching of this cross-genre inquiry. Seminar participants will conduct research on their own individual projects in the various genres, but we will spend time together discussing parallel developments and phenomena in those other genres (and areas of cultural production) with which we may not be as familiar as we are with our most accustomed one. I hope that this collegial conversation will lead to more wide-ranging and more culturally diverse scholarship and teaching in Romanticism than is sometimes the case when we find ourselves academically grounded in a particular genre and confined for both curricular and professional reasons to conducting most of our work in that area of inquiry.

The University of Nebraska Libraries offer splendid resources for the study of Romanticism in these broader contexts. In addition to the "Corvey Collection" of nearly 10,000 Romantic-era titles in English, French, and German, the library has extensive microform archives of contemporary periodicals that permit detailed contextual study of the Romantic literary culture. The library is a modern and well-stocked one, with excellent electronic resources for advanced study, including high-speed internet and a burgeoning program of initiatives in electronic scholarship and electronic texts, to all of which seminar participants will have full access.

Participants will enjoy full library privileges as visiting faculty, as well as visiting scholar status in the Department of English, where they will have individual office space during the seminar.

I have posted a detailed description of the seminar at the following URL:

This site has links to university resources (including the library and housing accommodations), to the necessary application information, and to a variety of community attractions. Lincoln is a pleasant and inviting place to work in the summer, and I look forward to welcoming and working with you and your colleagues.

Please note that I am actively encouraging applications from colleagues not just in English Studies, but also in History, Theatre, Art History, Music History, Journalism (and the history of print culture), Economics, and Comparative Studies in the Humanities. Tell your colleagues!

Please let me know if I can answer any questions or provide further information.

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The Wordsworth-Coleridge Association is sponsoring two sessions at the 2004 meeting of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia, and a lunch with the generous assistance of Pickering and Chatto Publishers.

LUNCH
Cash bar at 11:30 a.m., banquet at 12:00 noon to 1:15 p.m. on Tuesday, December 28 in Maggiano's Little Italy Restaurant, 1201 Filbert Street, Philadelphia. This lunch is open to members and non-members of the Association and the MLA. A vegetarian alternative is available. For reservations, send $25.00 (or $35.00 in Canadian currency), payable to The Wordsworth Circle, by December 10 to Marilyn Gaull, Department of English, New York University, 19 University Place, Room 536, New York, NY 10003. For further information, email: mg49@nyu.edu
ROMANTIC LITERATURE AND THE SCIENCES

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This is to announce a week-long workshop for scholars undertaking digital projects in nineteenth-century British and American literary and cultural studies. The workshop will be held at the University of Virginia, 18-22 July 2005, and will provide a practical setting where scholars can work at the development of their individual projects with other scholars who have shared interests, goals, and problems to be addressed. The theoretical, technical, administrative, and institutional issues connected to the development of digital scholarly work will focus the workshop's activities, which will be organized around and driven by the needs of the specific projects themselves.

The workshops will be run by faculty and staff at U. of Virginia involved with the NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) and ARP (Applied Research in Patacriticism) projects.

Everyone accepted into the workshop will have their lodging, breakfasts, and lunches provided during the period of the workshop. There will be a workshop fee of $350.

HOW TO APPLY
Applications should not exceed two single spaced pages. They should be headed with a project title and a one-sentence description of the project. They should include as well a developed project description that addresses each of the following matters:

the scholarly rationale for the project;
the technical and theoretical problems that face the project and that can be addressed in the NINES workshop;
the expected duration of the project, its phases, and some description of the current state of work;
the digital technology used or needed by the project;
and the technical support available to the scholar at his/her home institution.

FUNDING SUPPORT
Applicants are expected to secure financial support from their home institutions. For scholars in need, some financial support (for travel and workshop fees) is available. For applicants requesting financial aid, a separate document (not to exceed one page single-spaced) should accompany the workshop application explaining why aid is needed.

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We've been asked to post a reminder that the November 1, 2004 deadline is coming up for applications for Carl H. Pforzheimer Jr. Research Grants from the Keats-Shelley Association of America. For more details, see this previous posting.

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Charles E. Robinson has just brought to our attention an important new Website entitled "British Fiction, 1800–1829: A Database of Production, Circulation, and Reception."

Produced in Cardiff University’s Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research, the site "allows users to examine bibliographical records of 2,272 works of fiction written by approximately 900 authors, along with a large number of contemporary materials (including anecdotal records, circulating-library catalogues, newspaper advertisements, reviews, and subscription lists)."

In the Byron Society Website, you will encounter such things as membership benefits and forms, a history of recent Byron papers at the MLA, a list of the first five Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lectures (with McGann's lecture available in full text and with others to follow, including the wonderful lecture that Romulus Linney delivered this past Friday), and application forms for travel grants for graduate students.

In the Collection website, you will encounter Byron images and text that will lead you to such things as a donor page, a yet-to-be-developed book-sale page, and a catalogue of many of the items in the Collection, including books, booklets, busts, conference proceedings, engravings, exhibition catalogues, lithographs, manuscripts, sale catalogues, and much else.

We hope that you will use, enjoy, and learn from these websites, both of which will be further developed over the next few months.

The phrase 'Debatable Lands' has been used in reference to disputed parts of the Anglo-Scottish Border since at least the sixteenth century. Popularised by Walter Scott, the term was extended to other geographical areas and into metaphorical use in the nineteenth century. Macaulay in 1828 described history as the "debatable land" between Reason and Imagination. The BARS conference of 2005 invites an assessment of Romanticism's Debatable Lands in the fullest and broadest senses of the phrase.

Proposals for 20-minute papers are warmly invited on any aspect of the conference theme. Proposals should be not more than 300 words and submitted by 15 October, 2004. We are also interested in proposals for Special Sessions. Convenors of Special Sessions are asked to submit a title and details of the three 20-minute papers proposed for the Session by the deadline.

The conference organisers are Professor Claire Lamont and Dr Michael Rossington of the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at the University of Newcastle.

Online submission forms for proposals are available on the conference website. Alternatively you are welcome to submit a proposal by e-mail (BARS2005@newcastle.ac.uk) or by post to:

The South West Interdisciplinary Romanticism Link (SWIRL) has three aims: to strengthen a network of scholars working on different aspects of the period 1750-1850, to facilitate debate across the disciplines, and to boost the profile of Romantic studies in the region. We envisage a forum in which academics from the South West and beyond could explore the intellectual and professional challenges that currently energise our field.

This kind of project presents significant intellectual difficulties. "Romantic" can mean different things in different disciplines, and it would be foolish to impose a definition from the outset. Instead, we want to start a conversation about interdisciplinary engagements in Romantic studies. Are such things possible? Are we already involved in them? What shape might they take in the future?

With those questions in mind, we invite Romanticists to join us for a one-day symposium, comprising round-table discussions stimulated by short papers. Speakers drawn from a variety of disciplines will describe their current research and tell us how they engage with interdisciplinary approaches.

The symposium will be held in the beautiful surroundings of The Holmes, a listed building dating from 1879, where the American General Staff met during World War II. Places are limited, so please let us know soon if you'd like to come.